IBERIA
Regarding the favor treatment IB flights receive, I think your comments are being a bit simplistic just because it happened to you once, I say this with no intention of offending you or anybody else.
I am employed by a spanish airline (not IB) and I do fly regularly to LEPA and other airports around Spain, and I can tell that I have been told to slow down many many times to allow for traffics who were at times more distant than we were and worse positioned for a direct APP, that usually happens in LEPA,most of the times with Airberlin traffics, they are usually given priority over others, same applies for airports in small cities in northern Spain like Santander, where is not uncommon to have a Ryanair 40 NM north of the airport and another traffic 20 NM to the south and being told he is number 2 and to slow down.
My guess is that in some airports the companies having lots of flights and getting support from the regional administration are treated better than other who are not as important in terms of total number of flights.
This is only my opinion based in personal experience, I cannot back my opinion with any official data or statistics, so I could be wrong.
I do not think spanish ATC give spanish traffics priority over foreign ones, at least as a policy, you might always find the odd one who is not as professional as he /she should be as in every place and country.
I agree with you totally that the ATC level in Spain compared to UK is not even close in terms of quality or organization, and that there is plenty of room for major improvement on the services they provide, but come on , the guys are having a rough time with their managers who are not playing fair, they are just trying to defend themselves, donīt just make them look worse than they are, most of them are usually willing to help us getting directs and other stuff.
Good flights to all, and letīs hope this situation stops ASAP.
LEVC